SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) is coming into force on 14 September 2019. If you are selling online, you need to know about this and take certain steps to ensure that you are all set up for extra levels of authentication so that the bank doesn't reject your sales.

In summary, if you sell online and you are in the EEA and the customer is in the EEA then your payment services provider will, in the main, need to obtain two out of three types of authentication, namely:

• something the customer knows eg a password
• something the customer has eg a one time code generated by a token
• something the customer is eg fingerprint or voice

So you need to ensure that your payment service provider is up to speed with this and that you are doing all that they say you need to do in order not to have any disruption to your payments.

Stripe, Paypal and Go Cardless, amongst others, have published helpful guidance notes  so if you use these processors you will probably be aware of these changes.

 

Noel Guilford